For most of U.S. history, parents have warned their children, “If you want to succeed in life, you must get a good education.”

No matter where they came from or how low the family’s standard of living, that was the constant advice of mothers and fathers (in reality, mostly mothers). Education was a vital part of the way out of town, out of the region, out of ignorance and, much of the time, out of poverty.

There was a long period in the history of the U.S. when only the children of the privileged and the rich could be well educated. It was a long time before some of the children of workers and small farmers could be educated at all. There was no such thing as education for all. It was a crime for a long time to even teach slaves to read, let alone teach them history or mathematics or biology.

The struggle was a long one before there was such a thing as “free, universal, public education.” The powers that be were satisfied if their children were educated, so that they could take their rightful place in positions of power, in politics, in commerce, and in the nation’s vaunted judicial system. They would be the leaders and the rest would be followers, and followers did not need to know how to read a map or directions. In fact, if they didn’t know how to read or comprehend, it didn’t matter…they just needed to know enough to do what they were told.

Generations fought for this free, universal, public educational system and, finally, there was one. It wasn’t equally good for all, but, for the most part, it was a system that was meant to serve all children and, at least, it would do so through high school.

There is always a crisis of some kind in education, and there always have been organizations around whose sole purpose was to reform education. In many cases, the reformers were using research that was based on reality and they used analyses that were based on peer-reviewed procedures and studies and, occasionally, they brought the parents into the process of determining how the schools should be reformed.

Now, though, what we’re seeing in schools is the politicization of education, from pre-school to the university, and it’s getting ugly. The “reform” these individuals and groups are talking about is not so much about how schools can turn out graduates who are able not only to cope in the world, but who will be able to succeed and prosper in a democratic society. That means that they should be able to participate in the political process with a great degree of understanding and competence, as well as in their chosen field in the nation’s civic or economic life.

Alarm bells have sounded from all directions. In the U.S., students are about average in reading, compared with other similar nations, but they trail in other subjects, such as math and science. According to a report by the Associated Press at the end of 2010, out of 34 countries, the U.S. ranked (in a 2009 international assessment) 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in math. They were “far behind” the highest scoring countries, including, Canada, Hong Kong, Finland, South Korea, and Singapore.

As in so many areas of American life, whatever is a public service is blamed for the failure of the people. Education is one of the prime targets of eliminating the public part of that service. Perhaps education has been politicized for a very long time, but it is just in recent years that a concerted effort has been made to privatize as much as possible our public schools and universities.

There has been no greater proponent of turning public education into a private enterprise than the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has been pushing the privatization of public schools “through charters, vouchers, watering down teacher certification, breaking teacher unions, increasing testing, discrediting public schools, and eroding local control,” according to a joint report of The Center for Media and Democracy and The Nation magazine.

ALEC, made up of millionaires and billionaires, along with about 2,000 state legislators and members of Congress, is unabashed in its promotion of privatization of most public services, and education is one of those services. Charter schools is a concept that fits the bill for nearly all of ALEC’s goals for converting K-12 into private enterprises: weaken or eliminate teachers’ unions, free the schools from much of the regulation required by both state legislatures and the U.S. Department of Education, eliminate school boards as we know them, and drain funds from the public schools on the basis that the charter, too, is a “public” school.

As others have pointed out in recent years, the U.S. has gone from the demands of the people for local control of schools in the 1960s, to demands by (using the terms of the Occupy movement) the 1 percent for commodification and privatization of those same schools. What’s worse, the charter schools are often for-profit and the CEO is in charge and what he or she says, goes. Parents are not invited to participate in school activities; they are directed to do so. And, students who are not performing up to par are either refused entry to the charter in the first place, or they are pushed out.

That way, only likely graduates stay for the duration and the under performing students are shunted back to the public schools, sometimes on the same block. The public school cannot turn down the student who is not performing academically, as judged by the test results. Teachers worth their salt know that teaching to the test does not turn out graduates who are educated. Rather, they turn out students who can pass a test, but at the end of the process, they have…students who can pass a test.

Even with every advantage given to them, charter schools have been shown to be about even with public schools in their educational results, and that’s only teaching to the test. What is evident to professionals is that education is more than teaching to pass a test and that it takes an experienced teacher (with more than five years on the job) to make a day in class an educational experience. Charter schools notoriously exploit their non-unionized teachers, making them work 60-80 hours a week and expecting them to get results, such as a high percentage of students passing standardized tests. The turnover is said to be much higher among charter school teachers who, after all, have no protection against the demanded conditions, which practically guarantee burnout.

Never think that the potential for profit in education has escaped the notice of big-time investors. It has been reported that hedge funds are very interested and involved in “education,” as a moneymaking scheme. In fact, some observers have coined the term “Hedgistan,” for the geographical area between lower Manhattan and Greenwich, Conn., an area where hedge funds and their CEOs are concentrated and where the same CEOs pull in (it should not be termed “earn”) about $1 billion a year. Smack in the middle of that area is Harlem, an area of concentrated charter schools (best to keep the laboratory close by).

And, why not? Corporate America has heavily invested in health care, food, and war machinery. And, there is a huge pot of public money involved in education, from kindergarten to the university. If big investors can tap into that pile of wealth, it could be an endless stream into private coffers. It’s happening.

In a democracy, all of those things are important, as they are in any human society: food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education. But, for all of this to make sense, a society of educated citizens is necessary and they need to be involved in the democratic process. The kind of control envisioned by Corporate America for education is very similar to what has become of our food and water, our housing, and our health care system (if it can be called a system).

Even in the form that democracy exists in America today, the abstract principles of such a political system requires that citizens come out of their schools and universities educated, not stuffed with information and ready to do the bidding, without question, of whatever employer and supervisor hires them.

Diane Ravitch, who served as undersecretary of education in the George H.W. Bush Administration (Senior Bush), from 1991 to 1993, is an historian of American education and, at first, was a strong proponent of charter schools when she left that post, in favor of standards and school choice. She immediately associated with individuals and institutions that were vociferous proponents of school choice. Although Ravitch supported George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and the simultaneous growth of charter schools across the country, she became disillusioned with competition and with “accountability,” as expressed through a testing regime.

In March 2010, she wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “…over time, I became disillusioned with the strategies that once seemed so promising. I no longer believe that either approach will produce the quantum improvement in American education that we all hope for…Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in test-preparation materials. Meanwhile, there was no incentive to teach the arts, science, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages or physical education. In short, accountability turned into a nightmare for American schools, producing graduates who were drilled regularly on the basic skills but were often ignorant about almost everything else… Colleges continued to complain about the poor preparation of entering students, who not only had meager knowledge of the world but still required remediation in basic skills. This was not my vision of good education…”

She cited a Stanford University assessment of charter schools: “The only major national evaluation of charter schools was carried out by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond and funded by pro-charter foundations. Her group found that compared to regular public schools, 17% of charters got higher test scores, 46% had gains that were no different than their public counterparts, and 37% were significantly worse.” At the time, she pointed out that there were about 5,000 charter schools in the country, serving about 3 percent of all school children, and that President Obama wants more charter schools.

Among her conclusions, Ravitch noted: “…If anything, they (charter schools) represent tinkering around the edges of the system. They affect the lives of tiny numbers of students but do nothing to improve the system that enrolls the other 97 percent…”

There is no doubt in the minds of most Americans that our educational system needs serious reformation, but that can happen only when there are serious changes to the society (including the economy), itself. Most scholars…most observers…know, as Ravitch pointed out in 2010 that “…the best predictor of low academic performance is poverty - not bad teachers…”

Right-wingers do not want to hear that. Many others, regardless of political stripe, don’t want to hear that, because it means that change will come only with a more equitable distribution of the benefits of an egalitarian society. In this, President Obama and Mitt Romney, who sees himself as Obama’s replacement, think along the same lines. The president believes in tinkering along the edges of full reform, probably because it seems the politic thing to do, and Romney sees tinkering as both a way to make a profit and to appeal to his right-wing base in the coming presidential election. For Republicans, privatization of everything that can be privatized is the way to consolidate power and wealth, so Romney is 100 percent for it.

Education reform needs a national debate and it needs these two candidates to stake out their position on it clearly and in public. Platitudes in the public sphere will ensure our transformation into a nation of TV zombies who play with electronic gadgetry.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.